This invention is in the field of natural gas and oil (hydrocarbon) production. Embodiments of this invention are more specifically directed to the management of information regarding properties at which natural gas and oil wells are being drilled or are producing.
The economics of the oil and gas industry continue to raise the stakes for optimized hydrocarbon production. As well known in the art, the costs of drilling new wells and of operating existing wells continue to rise due to many factors. For example, new wells must be drilled to extreme depths, often in relatively inaccessible locations, in to reach remaining producible quantities of oil and gas. The cost of operating wells and production facilities also continues to rise. In addition, the integrity of producing wells must be monitored and maintained as necessary, adding additional cost to the overall production business. These high costs, as well as the relatively high prices for oil and gas in the world market, have placed significant pressure on the oil and gas producer to optimize oil and gas production in both the near and long term, while closely watching costs in doing so.
The optimization of production from a field or reservoir often involves decisions regarding the number and placement of wells, including whether to add or shut-in wells, and if so, where to do so. Once a decision has been made to drill a well, the logistics of drilling the well involves a wide range of personnel and factors. Geologists and geophysicists are involved in determining the location, depth, and direction of the well; engineering personnel are involved in arranging the specifics of the well itself; land personnel are involved to ensure that the proper rights and approvals are in place; and facilities personnel are involved to provide the appropriate support materials and equipment, including facilities for receiving well output, to name a few. Project management personnel are also involved to schedule the deployment of the necessary drilling personnel, and to specify and negotiate the necessary contracts with drilling contractors and other contract personnel and organizations. The personnel involved in these decisions are often dispersed, including personnel in different office locations, field personnel, mobile personnel, and personnel in different organizations and companies.
After a well is in place, decisions continue to be made regarding its operation. In addition, secondary and tertiary recovery operations, for example involving the injection of water or gas into the reservoir, require decisions regarding whether to initiate or cease such operations, and also how many wells are to serve as injection wells and their locations in the field. Some wells may require well treatment, such as fracturing of the wellbore if drilling and production activity have packed the wellbore surface to the extent that production has slowed. In some cases, production may be improved by shutting-in one or more wells for an extended period of time, in which case the optimization of production may require reconfiguring the entire production field.
All of these actions are performed with an eye toward maximizing production at minimum cost. As evident from these examples and as known in the art, the optimization of a production field is a complex problem, involving many variables and presenting many choices. In addition, the number and complexity of the decisions involved in drilling and operating new wells has increased with the depth and complexity of these new wells, increasing the number and nature of decision points involved in the operation of the overall reservoir.
Recent advances in technology have increased the amount of information that can be acquired from various locations and facets of an oil and gas field, and as such have enabled advanced computational and analysis techniques to extract useful information about the field from that information. Downhole and surface transducers provide real-time and periodic measurements of well conditions and operational status. Well logs, core samples, and other measurements of the formations and strata intersected by each well are also obtained, lending insight into the reservoir at and beyond the wellbore. Of course, production rates from each well and from the production field as a whole are measured over time. Beyond measurement data, documents such as field reports, maintenance records, engineering analyses, and the like that are pertinent to one or more wells in the production field are also prepared over time, and provide important insight into well history and past decisions. Some information is proprietary to the operator (e.g., status and parties to leases, location and attributes of pipelines, locations of other wells, locations of private roads, etc.), while other information important to the production operation is publicly available (e.g., topography of the production field, locations of rivers, roads, utilities, etc.). Not only is a large amount of pertinent information available, but this information exists in many forms.
Another trend involves the economies of scale that are enjoyed by larger operators in managing a large number of wells and properties over wide areas of the earth. Because of the size, number, and complexity of properties being managed, these larger operators often have many professionals involved in the management of the production effort, with these personnel often located at various facilities around the world. Various personnel also have diverse areas of skill and expertise applicable to the management of oil and gas production. As such, it would be useful for these diversely-skilled personnel, at multiple locations, to collaborate in making short term and long term decisions regarding the management of the oil and gas properties.
However, even with modern conventional information management systems, this collaboration and the resulting decisions are hampered by the time required to gather, exchange, correlate, and verify information among these people of different disciplines and at various locations. As a result of these trends and circumstances, the management of information relating to potential and producing oil and gas fields and properties, which has always been a large task, has become even larger. Unfortunately, conventional information management systems are limited in many ways. For example, documents and files pertaining to individual wells are often maintained in any one of a number of places within the overall information management system of a producer, especially in the case in which the wells being managed are located in many parts of the country or world. This dispersion of well files and documents renders it difficult for a decision maker to obtain the correct information quickly and efficiently. As a result, time-critical decisions are sometimes based on incomplete or out-of-date information and data, even if up-to-date information in fact exists somewhere in the overall information management system.
In addition, the content structure of these various files and documents varies widely. Measurement data and other objective measures pertinent to the operation are typically stored in a highly structured data set. Other information is semi-structured, while other information such as written reports and communications are essentially unstructured. Besides this variation in the structure of production field information, organizations often store these files and documents in an ad hoc manner, dependent largely on the personnel involved in generating and retaining such information. As a result, a good amount of the overall information pertinent to the oil and gas production operation is rendered essentially inaccessible or inscrutable to those personnel who are unfamiliar with the structure and organization of certain files and documents, such as those maintained in connection with a remote production field or under the supervision of a different organizational sub-unit. This variation in structure and organization is exacerbated upon an operator acquiring an existing production field or facility, as the acquired information pertinent to that acquired field or facility is necessarily of a different structure and organization.
FIG. 1 illustrates a visualization of the complexity of communications and information access for managing oil and gas exploration and production properties according to conventional techniques. Plane 2 refers to the interpersonal plane, at which personnel of the operator interact and communicate with one another. These personnel have a wide range of functions, as shown generically in FIG. 1, including land survey, operations, commercial, finance, land (i.e., leases and access right-of-ways, etc.), facilities, subsurface, regulatory, and management. These various personnel, who are likely deployed at various locations within the company and perhaps in other companies such as contractors, interact and communicate with one another in rendering decisions regarding exploration and production at the various fields. Plane 4 refers to the information plane, at which information useful to the personnel on plane 2 resides. This information is physically located at multiple locations, and in various manifestations, including multiple computer-readable data bases 3, physical files and storage locations 5, and as individual un-indexed documents 6. Each of these informational items may have importance to a particular production field, well, pipeline, land parcel, and the like, for which personnel on plane 2 are making decisions.
Operationally, this conventional information arrangement is cumbersome, insofar as rendering accurate and timely decisions are concerned. As visualized in FIG. 1, the interpersonal communication and interaction at plane 2 is ad hoc, with each interaction requiring some sort of meeting or other communication initiated by one party and participated in by others. And the access of information from information plane 4 is also ad hoc, generally requiring knowledge of the location and format of a particular item of information, or of an ad hoc index or other catalog of information. Typically, the manner in which information is stored in this rudimentary generic information management arrangement is dependent on the person storing the information, and as such can vary widely from sub-organization to sub-organization, or from person to person.
These difficulties in information management and decision making as reflected in FIG. 1 are compounded by the rate at which significant new well information is acquired by modern measurement and communication technology. Due to the ad hoc or otherwise compartmentalized organization of many conventional information management systems, such new information is not readily made available to or accessible by the appropriate personnel, particularly when such personnel are dispersed among sub-organizations and locations.